My mom's German. She came over in '57 or so to work for a bank in Manhattan. As you might imagine, my childhood was filled with meat and potatoes kinds of dishes, but with an ethnic flavor. Rouladen, frikadellen, rotkohl, knackwurst - these were words I grew up with. The food wasn't spicy, for the most part, just yummy. Though the flavor palette was somewhat limited.

In college and later on, I started to discover all the wonderful foods the world had to offer. When hubby and I would travel with our son, (this was when we had money for travel and we didn't spend money on much else) the rule was chain restaurants only as a last resort.

Indian, Sichuan, Mexican, Ethiopian, Greek, Japanese, Moroccan, Middle Eastern, Hunan, Vietnamese, Spanish, Korean, Polish - the world was there for the tasting. While I may be able to have some of these cuisines more often than others, I don't really have a favorite. It's the variety, the unique qualities of each that make them wonderful. Sadly, many of the restaurants we loved while traveling no longer exist. That's the nature of the restaurant business. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking, and if I'm in your town, I'm most likely going to pester you for recommendations. ;)

We announced in our Facebook group that MCB would be attending Yaoi/Yuri North as guests, and that more news would be forthcoming.

It feels all official now, mainly because Anime North (Yaoi North runs as a part of Anime North) has Angel and Freddy listed up on their site as Guests of Honour! (There may have been dancing and squeeing in place.) We found out when they tweeted the posting yesterday.

People who know me (Freddy) by other forms of social media are aware of the fact I have two cats, Nod and Bastet. They came to us via adoption from our local Humane Society Shelter. We have adopted all our cats from there (we still miss our KItKat deeply), and we always seem to end up with weird cats.

I mean, I know cats are weird, contradictory, mischievious, and all sorts of things, but ours are just plain weird. When discussing the girls that's even the response from other cat owners, "You have weird cats."

I'm pretty sure I have to take some of the blame. Our first cat, KitKat, was raised by a dog, so she basically thought she was one. KitKat played fetch, walked on a leash, was highly vocal, and expected belly rubs.

Nod and Bastet are a weird little combo. I almost didn't know what to do with them when we first got them. Nod was frightened of her own shadow and Bastet is the clumsiest animal (not just cat) I have ever met. I mean, how many cats fall when they try to jump onto a chair? Really, how many? We do figure her almost-dead state when the humane society found her as a days-old kitten has something to do with her motor development, but it was weird. (Especially since KitKat had been so graceful and a good jumper.)

Nod is the tortie camoflauging with the blanket while Bastet is wrapped around her. Nod is actually big on finding stuff she can camoflauge with. All over the house her favorite spots are ones where she blends. She's not such a fraidy-cat anymore, but she still has definite dos and don'ts everyone follows.

Like my poor dad who absolutely loves her? He's only allowed to pet her if he's on a bed. No joke. He must be seated on a bed for her to give him permission to pet her.

The list of Nod Rules is long.

The girls are pretty much opposites too.

Nod is insanely smart — like learning to turn a key in an armour to open the door smart, turning on and off lights smart, to opening all sorts of stuff and doors smart. While Bastet is dumb as a post. No, she really is. Our squeaky little Bastet is the dumbest (which a dumb cat sounds like an oxymoron to me) cat I have ever met. I love her. She is a loving cat. She's just incredibly stupid.

Nod watching us work outside and desperately wanting to boss us around.

Bastet waking up from one of her weird sleeping positions. (Though they both sleep in weird positions.)

Nod regularly has to bail Bastet out of stupid moments. Like how Bastet will go into a closet, get stuck, then Nod has to open the door for her to get out. I've seen Nod consider whether she wants to help at times. She totally sits there all, "Do I really want to let her out?"

They fight like sisters can, but they have each other's back too. Early on (when she was still really skiddish) Nod escaped the house one day and sent us into a panic. The back door bounced open and someone didn't notice. Being the curious kitty, Nod left while Bastet stayed inside. She was "gone" for a few days. We knew she had come back a couple times because we spotted her. After dozens of suggestions we knew she was coming back around because she was hungry. We set up stuff to tempt her back. She was getting the snacks, but our live animal traps weren't getting her. Bastet had been tore up the whole time, searching for Nod. Her loneliness was as palpable as her worry.

One night, just as I was about to go to bed, Bastet starts going nuts by my window. Me: What are you doing? Her: MEOW! PUR. LOOK YOU STOOPID HUMAN! Me: *opens curtains*

There Nod was, tired, looking anxious and just done, on the other side of the window. (I live in a trilevel, the window is ground level.) I ran up to the door (which was 10 feet from the window) and opened it. But Nod refused to leave the window or Bastet. I ended up having to bend the screen frame to let her in through the window before she finally came inside. Bastet helped clean her. Both obviously relieved she came home.

So were we. I had never been so upset. Nod was still at the stage of trying to learn to trust people so we had been worried she wouldn't come back.

Nod does trust us more—it's a continual process with a shelter rescue. She talks to us when she has something to say (she even has a "get the fuck outta my way" meow/purr. It's actually kinda funny.) Bastet helps keep Nod from being too full of herself. It's a good thing.

More than anything, I am happy to have our girls. They keep life interesting.

Hello all once again... Toni here for another episode of Stuff We Like, where I'm sharing my love of Marvel Movies.I'm probably going to cop shit from my fellow Mischiefers for declaring this, but I've never read a single Marvel or DC comic. That being said, I LOVE the movies.

Now I know the movies aren't perfect, I've heard about all the things that my friends haven't liked because they differ from the comics. And that's okay. You're never going to please everyone, no matter how hard you try. But for someone who hasn't read the comics and loves to watch movies for the entertainment value, the Marvel universe ticks all my boxes.

​I really enjoy the strong female characters of Black Widow and Gamora. And seriously, who can pass up the beautiful bounty of Chris's on offer? Evans, Pratt and the stunningly gorgeous Aussie (I might be a little biased) Hemsworth, will have me going back to the movies time and time again.

My Daughter also is a massive fan of all things Marvel and got quite excited when I told her what I was planning on writing about in this post. She hasn't seen the original X-Men movies yet, but rest assured I'll be fixing that as soon as possible.Marvel has a massive line up of movies for its fans in 2016 and I for one am so excited. The next installment from Captain America: Civil War, releases in May, along with X-Men: Apocalypse. Dr Strange is also set to hit the big screen in the second half of the year.

The movie I'm most looking forward to though? Has to be DEADPOOL!!! Oh My God. Can I just say that the marketing team for this movie has gone above and beyond anything I've ever seen before for a movie. They are nothing but pure geniuses.

One of the good things about living in Australia is the fact that Deadpool releases here a day earlier than in the USA (I am not poking my tongue out at you all, I swear)... I have my tickets booked for tomorrow night already and can't wait to see it.The US movie is rate R18+, where as here is Australia it's only been given a rating of MA15+. I hope this means us Aussies are simply a tougher crowd then the Americans and it takes a lot more for us to be offended, and not that they've cut scenes in the movie to cater to a younger crowd. I guess we'll find out soon. Either way it looks to be a great movie.

Are you a fan of the Marvel Universe or DC Comics movies? I'd love to know which character/movie is your favourite. What movie are you most looking forward to being released in 2016? Until next time...

I am horrendously late with this - I can only say that time got away from me today, and say a prayer to the squirrel gods to forgive me. --Scott

I have long wanted to be a published author. My family has a few of us - my brother Whit Honea has written a successful parenting book, and my grandmother Joyce Peterson was a prolific playwright, writing for the children at her church that she loved. But there are no other Coatsworth authors that I know of.

But there once was. There are not many Coatsworths in the world, truth be told. It's a fairly rare name, one that passed down to me from origins in Danish royalty in the 1400s and then the English countryside in the 1600s. I've only recently learned more about its storied history.

My branch of the family ended up in South Dakota. Another branch, closely related to my own, ended up in Ontario, and a few months ago, I met a woman from that branch who happens to live just two blocks from me, and is my first cousin, six times removed.

Along one of the other branches was an author named Elizabeth Coatsworth. Her line ended up in New England--she was born in New York in 1893. She was a fiercely intelligent woman, graduating from Vassar College and later from Columbia, and a world traveler, visiting what was then called the Orient, riding horseback through the Philippines, exploring Indonesia and China, and sleeping in a Buddhist monastery.

She started out writing poetry for adults, but then moved into children's literature on the advice of a friend and publisher. She won the Newbury Medal for "The Cat Who Went to Heaven" in 1930.

The year I was born, in 1968, she was a runner-up for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award for children's writers. And in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, intent on pursuing my writing career, she passed away at her home in Maine.

Our paths never crossed. But I knew about her.

I have recently taken more of an interest in her as my own writing career has started to take off. I discovered that she wrote or participated in at least 42 books. One of her last books, originally issued as "Pure Magic" in 1975, was later reissued as a Scholastic Book Services title as "The Werefox." It caught my eye because of the title - fascinating to me, because I now run a site that includes authors of many "were" stories. I ordered a copy of it through Amazon - $15 for what was originally probably a $2 book - and it was worth every penny.

I find her writing style to be magical, lyrical, enchanting:

"Johnny Dunlap woke and lay on his back in his narrow bed listening. There it was, the faint shrill sweet bark which had awakened him. Even in the deepest sleep, that sound could rouse him and call him back out of his dreams to the living world--if it was the living world to which he returned. Sometimes it seemed stranger than any of his dreams--one morning he had found a wild yellow violet in his hand, still fresh as if it had just been picked along a woods path."

I close my eyes and try to picture her at home, sitting in a fireplace-warmed room in Maine, looking out the window at the fresh fallen snow. Her mind is racing with the possibilities of the story, even at the respectable age of 82, still churning as the mind of a writer is wont to.

And I feel a connection with her. As if, in that moment, with that story, she was casting a line into the future. A line to me.

A few of her books are still in print, but most are scattered to the shelves of used bookstores and the dustbins of history. But perhaps her love of writing lives on a little, in me.

So I grab hold of the line she has thrown me, and write with all my heart..